This time, I will give directly contradictory advice.

Sometimes, people are hampered by a certain intimidation factor when it comes to difficult texts. They feel that they are too uneducated, haven’t read such-and-such books that ought to come before, need the for-dummies introductory version, and need someone to hold their hand while offering them a glass of milk.

I think such students should get over it and become comfortable reading things that they don’t understand and aren’t ready for.

So you didn’t completely understand what Kant was getting at because you never did read the Hume assignment and you’re not entirely sure what he’s referring to. So what? Keep going and focus on the part that does make sense to you.

At other times, the very best way to start understanding something is to immerse yourself in a huge flood of it. This is common advice for foreign languages. Just expose your mind to large volumes of the desired language without bothering to understand each and every word. Your mind will be processing all these currently unintelligible sounds in the background without any conscious, methodical analysis. There is a caveat with this, however. You can’t just passively leave the radio on in the background while doing other things. You may pick up a Spanish phrase or two this way, but it will be a long, long time before you can speak the language. You do have to make some effort to follow what is being said and grasp what you can out of the unintelligible mess as it is flying past.

I give this advice to middle school students approaching Shakespeare for the first time. When students first start, there are a huge number of unfamiliar words. Looking each one up would make the whole thing a slog and would interrupt the joyous rhythms of Shakespeare’s poetry. They need to just revel in the sound of it for a little while, even without understanding the meaning. If they just read and read and read while making—this part is important—some effort to understand, the language slowly starts to become more and more intelligible. By the time they’re on their third play, they might be ready to follow the plot. After a while, they don’t need to look up many words at all because they learn the words from context and usage.

I said that this week’s advice contradicts last week’s, but I’m (mostly) speaking tongue-in-cheek. In reality, I think the two approaches just apply to different scenarios. The flood-of-unintelligible-material approach applies when the kind of learning in play mostly involves making large amounts of intuitive associations. This applies to broad aesthetic appreciation, to gross physical skills like running or chopping wood, to fluency with language, or to intuitive social skills. It also has its place when you want to have a very broad but shallow knowledge of some reading material in preparation for a deep dive into one specific area.

By contrast, the step-by-step-painfully-slow approach applies when you need to grasp a piece of careful analytical reasoning or gain a detailed understanding of something by breaking it down. This applies to logic, to close legal arguments, to the detailed mastery of specific micro-skills in dance or painting, or to grammatical analysis of language.

Both have their place, and human intelligence is at its best when we use both in combination under appropriate circumstances. The trouble is that many people seem to apply the flood-of-unintelligible-material approach out of laziness when they should be making an effort to understand just one tiny thing at a time, but for the same reason, they give up on that approach long before they’ve actually exposed their mind to enough material for it to work.

When it comes to tough philosophical argumentation, which is most of what I teach, I’ll stick to my earlier advice.

The post How to Read Difficult Texts, Part 2 appeared first on The Miskatonian.

If you can read a text breezily, in a reclining position, with a cocktail in one hand, and come away with confident assurance that you have understood every single thing the author has said, then that text is probably not worth your time. It might be good as pure, time-filling entertainment, but you may as well watch daytime reruns of soap operas.

Such a text isn’t telling you anything you don’t already know, so it isn’t stretching your mind. To learn from a text, it has to have a certain level of difficulty and this means going well beyond your current level of understanding. It can’t be completely incomprehensible, of course, but I don’t think that many of my students are laboring under the false expectation that they should be forcing their eyes to run over paragraphs of Linear A.

How should one approach such texts, then, so that the difficult and challenging is not, at least, tortuous?

I have one simple tip, but it requires patience and the willingness to get through fewer pages (it’s tough for those achievement-oriented checklist types and worse for procrastinators reading last minute for a deadline). Read one sentence at a time, even one clause at a time, if the sentences are complex. When you hit the period, pause. Think about it. Make sure that you have actually understood at least the most obvious implications of what has been said. Then, move to the next sentence. Pause. Think about it. Now here comes the crucial bit: Do you understand why this thought follows from the one before it? If you do not grasp the logical progression from the thought in sentence A to the thought in sentence B, don’t keep going. Stop. Read the two sentences together again. You may even have to go back a paragraph or two—or ten.

Naturally, this will be slow-going, but it gets faster in time. The more you practice this kind of deliberate reading, the more you will begin to understand the deep structure of what the authors are saying. Human beings across centuries have very few truly new ideas, and the connections between the ideas flow along largely predictable lines. When you master the flow from A to B to C in one author, you will much more readily grasp the flow from A to B to C in another. You’ll even be much quicker in recognizing the flow from A to B to D in a third author who disagrees with the first two. You’ll be able to spot the critical juncture of their disagreement.

When I first explain this way of reading to freshmen college students, they often roll their eyes, sigh, and make clear that what I’m suggesting sounds like a total drag. Really, it’s a much more enjoyable experience than the alternative.

I surmise that most of them read like this: Read a sentence. Kinda get the gist, or at least that certain subjects were mentioned. Read another sentence. More words on that subject. Great. Read another sentence. Think about pizza. Half-realize that their eyes have passed over three intervening sentences. Skip. Read another sentence. Kinda get that sentence because it reminds them of a funny clip from The Office (they haven’t seen the full episode, only the clip on TikTok). Read another sentence. Totally meaningless. Wonder when this whole ordeal will be over so they can order that pizza. Read another sentence. More meaningless philosobabble. Put the book down so they can order the pizza anyway. Think about picking the book up again twenty minutes later, experiencing a shudder of revulsion for the whole previous experience, a vague sense that they are being judged by someone for being stupid, immediately followed by a series of defensive slogans belittling the usefulness of philosophy.

Such an exercise is much worse than wasted time. After a few such experiences, many students will fall into misology—a distaste for thinking—which Socrates gravely warns against in the Phaedo.

Since the student moved on from the very first sentence with only a vague impression of the subject matter, it was inevitable that the following sentences would devolve into an incomprehensible mess. When we are faced with a stream of incomprehensible nonsense, it becomes increasingly difficult, with every passing second, to keep our interest up (don’t just blame technology for our short attention spans). When our interest is broken, and we become distracted by numerous other things that we do understand and care about, then the game is up. There’s even less chance at that point that we will understand the flow of thought from the following sentences since they assume that the reader has read and understood what came before them. Hence, each following sentence will just get worse and worse. Continuing to move our eyes across the page at that point is simply an exercise in self-masochism.

I would much rather have a student who came into the next class and said, “Professor, I’m sorry, but I simply could not finish the whole reading assignment. I became stuck on the very first sentence. If I understand him correctly—and I’m still not sure that I do—I think Aristotle is suggesting that…and I became very puzzled by why he would think that, let alone begin there. I spent an hour wrestling with the grammar of this long first sentence before giving up. I had to move on to my math homework. Here are my notes.”

That student gets an A for the day and is exempt from the quiz.

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which I will give directly contradictory advice.

The post How to Read Difficult Texts, Part 1 appeared first on The Miskatonian.